Future Dib
by Dibsthe1
Summary: Drabble. No connection whatsoever to the episode of the same name. How the world of the future looks back at Dib. One Shot. Rated for some controversial content.


Future Dib

Drabble. No connection whatsoever to the episode of the same name. How the world of the future looks back at Dib. One Shot. Rated for some controversial content.

Disclaimer: I don't own Invader Zim. For reasons unclear even to me, I still own a few textbooks, though.

Warning: This fic contains some highly controversial ideas.

**Future Dib**

Seething with frustration, Dib slumped in his desk. His classmates were behind him only in the physical sense. None of them had one clue what he was trying so hard to accomplish. Indeed, not a single one would lift a finger to help him in any way, no matter how small.

If they could only comprehend what Zim was here to do! They would... well, Dib wouldn't put it past them to hand over the earth to that bizarre race of marauding aliens without the merest peep of resistance. _Idiots,_ he thought, gritting his teeth.

He was jolted from these thoughts by an eraser slapping into the side of the head, followed by a stifled snorts of laughter. He whipped around to see which of these loathsome brats had done this, but the sheer number of his classmates who were obviously delighted made it impossible to tell who had actually thrown it.

_And not just any idiots, but idiots so infantile that this was the funniest thing they could imagine. Why why WHY am I stuck with facing THEM day after day?_

His concentration shattered, Dib looked down at his open textbook with a quiet sigh. Ms. Bitters was still reciting the lesson, punctuating it plentifully with the word "doom." As he continued looking down at his book, Dib followed the text with his eyes the better to block out the teacher's relentlessly grim and negative version.

"The Union was doomed, the slaves were all doomed... " Ms. Bitters continued. Today's history class topic was Abraham Lincoln.

Dib's active mind soon recalled hearing about an alternative version of Lincoln.

Where everyone just "knew" Abraham Lincoln was a humble, lower class worker and a firm Christian who opposed slavery with every fibre of his being, somewhere Dib had heard that Lincoln was a wealthy railroad lawyer who only claimed to be religious; in his heart Lincoln was an atheist. Moreover, his policy on slavery had flip-flopped depending on the politics of the group he was addressing. So Lincoln, like any other politician, would tell people whatever they wanted to hear.

Dib could have sworn he'd read somewhere that Lincoln's main priority was keeping the union together, and if a few slaves happened to be freed or a few civil rights trampled along the way, well, so be it. However, he couldn't recall exactly where he'd read this, or how much he believed it at the time.

In any event, it would be very difficult to get the bare, unvarnished facts... something which Dib always insisted on doing, no matter unpopular it might make him. It was entirely possible that some facts had been garbled by the march of time or even left behind completely; many, many rebels had kept many long nights' watch for British soldiers on the move, but today the only name anybody remembered was Paul Revere. Similarly, the crowd-pleasing version of Lincoln would be by far the easier to find.

Dib shrugged and turned his attention back to something of far more immediate consequence. He took out his pencil and opened to the inside back cover of his book to sketch ways to capture and hold Zim for good... even if he would have to grow to adulthood before finding someone who WOULD take him seriously...

Fast Forward to the year 2090...

Xa hated her classmates, wished with all her might that he didn't have to go to skol to face these stupid bitches every day. Okay, so none of them would ever talk to her. Fine, she could live with that. They were all stupid anyway. But they also delighted in seeing who could make up the most embarrassing rumor about her. To hide her disgust and contempt as the latest lie whispered from desk to desk, she bent low over her history textbook.

According to this page, the greatest hero of all the heroes of the dying 21st century was someone named Dib. In an early model space ship he had flown past all the houses in his town, shouting at the top of his lungs, "The aliens are coming, the aliens are coming!" The opposition had been staggering; the invader's superiors had again and again sent this vanguard their best plans and their best equipment, but Dib had singlehandedly thwarted the evil invader's every attempt! And all this when he was still in grade skol!

Oh, how wonderful it must have been to live at the same time as this boy, to say nothing of actually being in his classroom, sighed every single one of Xa's classmates as she dreamed of shyly placing a heart-shaped seaweed leaf on his desk on Meat Day... although why it was called "Meat Day" no one knew. Only old people ate meat... when they could get it, that is. Where would the human race be now if not for him?

Xa wondered just how much of that century old story was even true, but every time she brought up this point, she would be shouted down with derisive catcalls. Of course Dib was the hero of humanity! It was for sheer love of his fellow humans that he had done all that he did! How dare anybody suggest otherwise!

Only too well did Xa know how much "love for humanity" lived in the heart of the average skolchild. A crumpled up ball of paper hit her in the back of the head, followed immediately by hushed snorts and giggles.

Gritting her teeth, Xa began to sketch a device that would make such incidents a thing of the past. Kids such as she could one day learn all they needed to learn through video games. Xa would never need to go to skol again. Ever.

_(A/N) "Skol" is a deliberate misspelling. If the "c" was obsolete by Dib's time, by Xa's time the second "o" might well also be. _


End file.
